Horses in British history

The farrier's craft

Shoeing horses is an ancient craft. The Farriers Registration Council notes that it is believed to have been practised first in the Roman Empire. In London, the Worshipful Company of Farriers, a livery company of the City, was established in 1356, and for centuries it ran examinations in the craft.

Regulation came much later. In the 1970s the Worshipful Company of Farriers and the farriers' trade association both came to the view that regulation was in the interests of horse welfare, and the Farriers (Registration) Act 1975 came into force on 1 January 1976. It made shoeing by anyone unregistered a criminal offence, and set up the Farriers Registration Council to keep the register. See Working with your farrier.

Science comes to the stable

1598: the anatomy of the horse. Carlo Ruini, an Italian aristocrat, senator and lawyer, published Anatomia del Cavallo, a pioneering manual of horse anatomy. The University of Edinburgh's library, which has digitised its copy, quotes a 1919 history of veterinary literature: at Ruini's hands, equine anatomy "jumped at a single bound from the blackest ignorance to relative perfection".

1791: Britain's first veterinary school. In the decades before, there was growing concern about horses' welfare, and a movement to give farriers a grounding in science. The Odiham Agricultural Society, alarmed at what it saw as quackery, was at the forefront. The Royal Veterinary College explains that its foundation story is linked to Eclipse, the racehorse who dominated the 1769 and 1770 seasons and died at stud in 1789. The public wanted to know what had killed him and the secret of his success. The post-mortem was carried out by a Frenchman, Charles Benoit Vial de St Bel, who was in England lobbying for a veterinary school. He became the first principal of the Veterinary College, London, founded in 1791: the start of the veterinary profession in Britain.

Horses and the army. In the early 19th century, Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger sought to make sure every cavalry regiment had vets, to reduce the loss of horses in the war against France.

1823: Scotland's veterinary school. William Dick, the son of an Edinburgh farrier, trained as a farrier at his father's forge. After a three-month course at the London college, he gained his diploma in 1818 and set about founding a school in Edinburgh. His first lectures, in 1818, attracted no students at all. But on 24 November 1823, with support from the Highland Society of Scotland, he gave the first lecture of what became the Royal (Dick) School of Veterinary Studies, to 25 farriers and smiths and other interested listeners.

Thoroughbreds and the Stud Book

In 1770 James Weatherby, a lawyer from Northumberland, was appointed Secretary to the Jockey Club and Keeper of the Match Book at Newmarket. In 1791 the first General Stud Book was published, recording the earliest details of the Thoroughbred. Weatherbys still keeps it today. See the Thoroughbred profile.

The age of the working horse

Before engines, horses did the heavy lifting. The Rare Breeds Survival Trust records that at the start of the 20th century, 2.6 million heavy horses were working in British agriculture and trade. Shires, Clydesdales and Suffolks worked the land, moved war supplies and even pulled royal carriages.

In the cities, cab horses worked long, hard hours. In 1886, moved by the plight of London's cab horses after reading the novel Black Beauty, Ann Lindo founded the Home of Rest for Horses. Now called the Horse Trust, it describes itself as the oldest horse charity in the world. Its first aim was to support London's working horses and the people who relied on them.

Horses at war

The Horse Trust records that over six million horses served in the First World War, 1,183,228 of them supporting the British Army. Almost a million fought on the Western Front, but only about 60,000 came back to Britain.

In 1914 the Home of Rest for Horses designed and gave the Army Veterinary Service the first motorised horse ambulance, to carry wounded horses from the front line in France to veterinary stations. In two years it travelled some 13,000 miles and carried more than 1,000 injured horses. It was so successful that the War Office adopted it as the official specification and ordered more. By the end of the war, the Horse Trust says, over two million horses had been treated and returned to duty. After the war, the Home of Rest began taking in military veterans, such as San Toy, who served in both the Boer War and the First World War, a tradition it continues today.

Into the modern age

Mechanisation transformed horses' lives. The Rare Breeds Survival Trust notes that the mechanisation of farming and warfare has left the heavy horse's original jobs largely in the past. Its numbers are worryingly low: in one recent year, just 240 Shire, 199 Clydesdale and 25 Suffolk pedigree foals were registered. Yet heavy horses still have work to do, in the army, policing, equine therapy and commercial logging. The Household Cavalry uses them on ceremonial occasions, to carry its musicians and silver kettle drums, as "a tangible link to our military heritage".

See the Clydesdale and Suffolk profiles, and Lifecycle for how a horse's care changes through its life.